Is there hope even in the downest and dirtiest places?
Her squirms of protest accompany the morning alarm. Stumbling to the community wash she takes on Thumbs and Butternut, tenants that send dogs scurrying into the street, hitting themselves with newspapers to discourage pursuit.
She once asked the ventriloquist next door for a little relief from defective life, so he put 13C on his lap and gave it the timbre of high rent.
Here dirt cleans itself on passersby. Pink neon glows, tries to bathe the street, only to draw back--like peers from an eight-grader oozing with too much brain and forehead, and zip on the varsity letter potential.
"Gwenda the good witch don't come down here. Never seen Sante or the April Bunny either. So wadaya spect?" Slithers Billy Tooth, as he shakes down the naked cabby.
At Ninth and Elm she spots the soft-shell cockroach that lives in the church basement. On Hanover she stumbles over Ham Sandwich and Pig in a Blanket, then they steal her lunch. There is great commotion out back of Ratellas, outside the kitchen: nobody wants to give up their place in line to the new kid; The one with two good fists, fresh gauze and tape over his eyes. There really is something she wants, knows, needs . . . She'd felt it watching one of those dopey shows, (the people with half hour problems), in the final minute when the dumb remarkably see. That light in their eyes . . . that is to covet.
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“The woman or man who is a poet, or fiction writer, or playwright, or all of these, is engaged constantly in a jazz ballet of vocabularies, passions, genders, histories, perspectives, death, love, and life. The music of revelation announces itself to
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Keep posting, Poet.
In admiration,
Andre Emmanuel Bendavi ben-YEHU